It is known to manufacture shipping pallets from plastic materials such as high density polyethylene (HDPE), polypropylene, and other polymers. Pallets can be single sheet or double sheet and can be manufactured using thermoforming and injection molding techniques.
Single sheet pallets have the advantage of lighter weight, but often exhibit a number of disadvantages including excessive flexibility, incompatibility with roller conveyors and the absence of safety straps on the bottoms of the forklift openings to prevent inadvertent separation of a loaded pallet from the tangs of a forklift truck.
Double skin, or “twin sheet” pallets solve many of the forgoing problems, but often exhibit their own disadvantages including greater weight and higher costs due to the use of a greater volume of plastic material as well as more complex fabrication techniques as a result of the need to form both upper and lower sheets and then join the two sheets together to form a unitary structure.